Embattled Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has stated that he has no plans to resign.
When asked if he would consider stepping down as chairman, Zuckerberg told CNN Business “That’s not the plan.”
Coming in defense of Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, who has faced heavy criticsm over her handling of the social media giant’s recent crises, he said “Sheryl is a really important part of this company and is leading a lot of the efforts for a lot of the biggest issues we have.”
“She’s been an important partner to me for 10 years. I’m really proud of the work we’ve done together and I hope that we work together for decades more to come.”
An investigative piece published last week by The New York Times recently accused Facebook of misleading the public about what it knew about Russia’s election meddling. They also accused the social media giant of using a PR firm to spread negative stories about other Silicon Valley companies as a way of diverting attention from itself.
“It is not clear to me at all that the report is right,” Zuckerberg said of the Times article.
“A lot of the things that were in that report, we talked to the reporters ahead of time and told them that from everything that we’d seen, that wasn’t true and they chose to print it anyway.”
Zuckerberg also defended his company against the broader wave of flak it has taken this year.
“A lot of the criticism around the biggest issues has been fair, but I do think that if we are going to be real, there is this bigger picture as well, which is that we have a different world view than some of the folks who are covering us,” he said.
“There are big issues, and I’m not trying to say that there aren’t… But I do think that sometimes, you can get the flavor from some of the coverage that’s all there is, and I don’t think that that’s right either.”